If you’ve yet to experience the joys of Amazon’s unique Whispersync for Voice technology, which keeps the Audible and Kindle editions of a given book in sync with one another as you switch back and forth between them, ensuring you can always pick up right where you left off no matter which edition you pick up, here are two excellent books to start with.
Both have been very highly-rated in both their Kindle and Audible formats, and both offer the Audible narration at a deeply discounted price of just $3.99 after the Kindle book has been purchased. To take advantage of the discount, buy the Kindle book FIRST, then click the “add narration” link on the purchase confirmation page for the Kindle book.
Everything That Rises Must Converge (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $8.89 in Kindle format)
This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O’Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment.
The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother’s prejudices, but his smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice. Note: in the Audible audiobook edition, this story is performed by actor Bronson Pinchot.
Similarly, “The Comforts of Home” is about an intellectual son with an Oedipus complex. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother in an attempt to murder a harlot.
The other stories are “A View of the Woods”, “Parker’s Back”, “The Enduring Chill”, “Greenleaf”, “The Lame Shall Enter First”, “Revelation”, and “Judgment Day”.
“The current volume of posthumous stories is the work of a master, a writer’s writer– but a reader’s too– an incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language.”–Newsweek
“All in all they comprise the best collection of shorter fiction to have been published in America during the past twenty years.”–Theodore Solotaroff, Book Week
“When I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.”–Thomas Merton
KF on KND Editor’s Note: if you want a complete volume of O’Connor’s short stories (no Audible narration available), you can get it in The Complete Stories – Flannery O’Connor, currently priced at $9.99 in Kindle format. Includes all the stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge and her other short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, plus twelve more.
The Perfect Storm (4/5 stars, currently priced at $8.61 in Kindle format)
There is nothing imaginary about Junger’s book; it is all terrifyingly, awesomely real.
–Los Angeles Times
It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high—–a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it “the perfect storm.”
In a book that has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched.
The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that makes us feel like we’ve been caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control.
KF on KND Editor’s Note: this book was adapted into the movie The Perfect Storm, released in 2000 and starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.